Posts tagged skills

The fifth inner skills for each of the eight schools are arriving in the next Age of Wushu update, and if you're a player, you'd probably like to know what they do, wouldn't you? I mean, one of them might instantly kill everything in a seven-meter radius, and the other might summon a moderate quant...

SWTOR penny-pinchers rejoice, for the oppressive tyranny of skill costs are about to become history. In a post on the forums this afternoon, BioWare announced that it will be abandoning skill training costs as of next week.
"One thing has become clear from the player feedback in not only this th...

MJ and I were talking while playing The Secret World the other day about the game's legendary fight length. Well, at least I consider fights in this MMO as taking longer than normal. I told her that generally if a standard, level-even mob isn't dead by a rotation-and-a-half of my skills, or about e...

I'm not the best under pressure in video game sometimes. When something really bad starts happening that I'm not prepared for, what I need the most -- and am always denied -- is the time to think it through. Whoops, I accidentally aggroed 25 hellbugs in RIFT when I only meant to grab three, and the...

Welcome to day two of Massively's ArcheAge launch diary. Technically, by the time you read this, it'll be day three, but you know how these things work. And I know, I know, it's not really launch; it's head start. But Trion's not wiping this weekend's progression, so I'm going to keep referring to...

There are few things I love so much as writing a column for June 30th only to find out on the 30th that the patch I'm discussing is going live on July 1st. You know, when it's too late to change anything. I really would have been happy to have found that out before the day.
But, hey, WildStar's ...

In the original version of Darkfall, skill selection was a wide-open field. When the game relaunched as Darkfall Unholy Wars, the role system was introduced, narrowing the field of options significantly. Now custom roles are incoming, and that means that players have questions about how the new mec...

It's time to get skilled in Shroud of the Avatar's combat system. That is, it's time to actually have access to the skills that will eventually be in the game. Release 5 is now open to the game's backers, and it brings with it 35 of the 171 skills that will eventually be in the full game. Some skil...

Never in 15-plus years of MMO gaming have I been so bewildered when it comes to picking a main class and character. Part of this is because I ignored The Elder Scrolls Online prior to March 30th. So I'm drinking from the information firehose in terms of game mechanics while simultaneously trying to...

Blizzard has released a quintet of post-60 skill videos for its forthcoming Diablo III expansion. Reaper of Souls, which launches on March 25th, grants each class a new skill at level 61. These skills are Avalanche (for Barbarians), Vengeance (for Demon Hunters), Epiphany (for Monks), Piranhas (for...

Whenever I enter a League of Legends match, I have a few goals set in mind. Of course, winning is a goal, but that's not the only goal. My agenda tends to be a lot more long-term, relative to other LoL players.
We've talked a lot about meta lately, and it tends to be a hot topic with Season 4's ...

MMO players strive to obtain some kind of tangible progression each play session, but the method by which that progression is delivered varies greatly across the genre. Archetypal themepark titles frequently rely on level-based progression that culminates in climbing through gear tiers at endgame, ...

I've written before about how developers use clever mechanics to lower the barrier to entry in order to encourage more people to play MMOs, but how do they keep players interested after they have rolled a new character? More often than not, MMOs greatly benefit from hanging onto players for as long...

Blackguards is a recently released strategy roleplaying game from Daedalic Entertainment that features an obscene level of character detail, as evidenced by this look at the game's skill trees.
Functionally, assigning skills in Blackguards is pretty simple. You earn experience which gives you ...

The next big patch for Age of Wushu is due out next month, which should be reason enough for players to be excited about it. But it's hard to get excited about an update with no idea what's in it. So it's a good thing that the official site has posted a small preview detailing the coming update, a ...

Guess what, Repopulation fans? It's time for another update, that's what. Above & Beyond has posted a list of alpha weapon abilities on the game's website. The post notes that "some weapon lines are still under construction and missing abilities," but it's nonetheless an extensive info dump tha...

Are you wondering what you'll get when you become emperor of Elder Scrolls Online -- other than a fancy suit of armor, that is?
The Official Xbox Magazine discovered that player emperors will gain a skill line that they will retain for the rest of their time in the game. The skills will persist ...

The latest installment of ZeniMax's "Ask Us Anything" question-and-answer feature is all about progression in The Elder Scrolls Online. Players from ESO's French and German fansites, Game-guide.fr and TESOnline.de, have submitted a great deal of questions which are added to the usual variety of in...

Ready for more Elder Scrolls Online progression info? We hope so, because ZeniMax has dropped a fairly meaty dev blog this afternoon that details the upcoming fantasy MMO's skill lines.
Wait, isn't ESO a class-based game? Well, yes, but ZeniMax says that classes won't "chain you to any one plays...

It's not fair to call Path of Exile's pre-launch patch a kitchen sink patch; this is big enough to include the sink, dishwasher, fridge, and probably a good chunk of the dining room besides. It's a big patch, and when it goes fully live tomorrow, you'll have a chance to play around with the enormou...